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Monthly Archives: October 2016

Hi guys, I’ve put together a quick post to show how I go about building a boat out of coffee stirrers… A few of you were asking, so have at it – lots of pics, and not much words 🙂

Soak ’em

Brace ’em

Add boiling water & leave overnight, then pour the water away and leave the stirrers for a day to dry while braced in position

Nice bend to them, still slightly damp

Very flexible

Braces glued on to form the sides

Put them ‘back to back’ (braces out!)

Cut the shape of the prow through both sides…

so that it matches…

Repeat at the other end

switch the sides around and glue prow and stern

Glue in some bracing – top…

and bottom… Let it all dry for a day or two

Add planking (I planked the bottom on this one to make a rowing boat, but my first one had the planking on top to make a deck… your choice!)

Add some bits…

and some bobs!

There we go, I hope that makes the process a bit clearer. Obviously, this is just a very quick scenery project – the boats are not especially to scale, and aren’t highly detailed. This is a quick, low cost solution to address a particular need within a Frostgrave scenario, but this approach should also work for a range of games from fantasy, historical, pirates, whatever! I daresay that with more time, effort and skill, you could really create something spectacular… (Mikko, I’m lookin’ at you bud!)

Hello folks, a cheeky little bonus post this evening – I cranked out a rather lovely Frostgrave Zombie Troll from Northstar Games this evening. He was already undercoated and I’d textured up the base already so I just spent a few hours splashing some ink around. I needed to get him speed-painted up for a spoooky halloween game I’m planning for my own tribe of little horrors – it’ll be a stripped down version of the Frostgrave rules, and will pitch Hraxi Jonas and Samwise Short-round against the shambling undead in a heroic quest for treasure! And candy! Should be good fun 😉

Right, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system I can show you my newly finished Ed209 inspired robots in the spirit of Dreadtober. I’ve tried to incorporate a few design elements from the original Robocop movie, specifically the light grey, and the matt black canopy for the ‘head’. I also wanted to match them with my small collection of RT era Guard, so included the dark blue elements, the red & white cheques, the graffiti and weathering. I was a bit worried that the weathering would detract from the overall Robocop vibe, but in the end I just went for it – I figure that these droids would get some pretty hard use, and would show some serious wear and tear. I think it worked out, but see what you think:

So, that’s it for this little project – hope you folks like ‘em. I’m glad to get it out of the way to be honest, it has been a really busy time, and I haven’t been able to just sit and put in the hours that something like this demands. The approach has therefore been a bit haphazard, and I don’t really like to paint that way. I’ll be getting on with some Frostgrave bits over the coming weeks, so expect to see smaller, more manageable jobs for the foreseeable future. I also have some boats to build, (with corresponding tutorial!).

Finally, I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who chipped in with some honest feedback and good advice during the build. It’s so easy to say ‘yeah, that’s great mate’, (like), but it is much more courageous and time consuming to engage your brain and give some constructive criticism, so thank you to everyone who helped. You guys totally rock!

Ahoy! A quick post from me this fine morning… So, you know that thing that happens, where you casually take a look at an upcoming campaign and realise that there is a load of stuff that you neeeed but don’t have? Well, that happened to me with the Frostgrave ‘Thaw of the Lich Lord’ book… There are a few bits and bobs to sort out, (cultists, Rangifers, a cart, a big cauldron, more undead, an ‘effing big bone wheel…), but one thing that really jumped out was the need for a frozen river – complete with ice-bound boats. Now, I don’t know about you guys & gals, but I don’t have any boats in my terrain collection… never needed ‘em, never even thought about it. Given how situational the need is, I wanted to do something fairly quick and low-cost. My little brain-box has been working over the challenge in the background, and I started to wonder how practical it is to build boats from scratch with stolen coffee stirrers… Turns out that it is absolutely practical:

Not bad for an essentially free piece of terrain, eh? I don’t know how accurate it is from a nautical perspective, but it ticks the box as a terrain item I think – a quick paint job, and this should be good to go 🙂 I reckon that I need another three to five similar or smaller sized boats, and a larger one as the scenario centre-piece… I’ll need to work these around other stuff as and when – my enforcement droids are nearly finished, and I have some new cultists that I am dying to paint, (these are going to be really special!), so it’s a case of best endeavours with this one…

Greetings fellow primates, hope you are well! Thank you to all those who provided constructive feedback on my latest little project – you’ve all helped me to spot the little areas for improvement, and made the end result much better than it would otherwise have been, so thank you 🙂

So just for the sake of completeness, here are my ed209s, built and undercoated, (I’ve photographed them with my PD guys to give you an indication of how I’ll be painting them up):

I also had time to do a little scenery thing over the weekend – some fire/explosion markers for the final game in the Frostgrave Dark Alchemy expansion. These were super quick, easy and fun to do – it is just strips of cotton wool superglued to the base of one of those cheap flickering tea light thingies, a dab of PVA glue to hold the tops of the strips together, and a quick squirt of black spray. So simple, but so effective – here are a few pics of them in various states:

It took about five minutes per marker, cost me next to nothing to produce, and look pretty darn good – even if I do say so myself! I’m playing that final Dark Alchemy game with my Brother-in-Lead on Wednesday night – hopefully my tick-tock men and fire markers will look the part on the table, and fingers crossed that I can avoid getting my wizard killed/maimed/burned/exploded! (d20’s can be such a cruel mistress)…